Although advertisements on the web pages may degrade your experience, our business certainly depends on them and we can only keep providing you high-quality research based articles as long as we can display ads on our pages.

To view this article, you can disable your ad blocker and refresh this page or simply login.

Dividends are a shareholder’s best friend. Not only do dividend stocks have wider moats than the average stock, but studies have also shown that the best dividend stocks beat the market in the long run.

At Insider Monkey, we follow over 740 smart money investors, including more than 60 funds that are currently managed or were run by billionaires. Assuming that this particular group has much better stock-picking skills, let’s take a look at some of these billionaires’ funds favorite dividend stocks, which include Pfizer Inc. (NYSE:PFE), Intel Corporation (NASDAQ:INTC), The Coca-Cola Co (NYSE:KO), Macy’s Inc (NYSE:M), and Marathon Petroleum Corp (NYSE:MPC).

Through extensive research, we determined that imitating some of the picks of hedge funds and other institutional investors can help generate market-beating returns over the long run. The key is to focus on the small-cap picks of these investors, since they are usually less followed by the broader market and are less price-efficient. Our backtests that covered the period between 1999 and 2012, showed that following the 15 most popular small-caps among hedge funds can help a retail investor beat the market by an average of 95 basis points per month (see the details here).

Portogas D Ace/Shutterstock.com

#5 Marathon Petroleum Corp (NYSE:MPC)

— Nr. of Billionaires Holding Shares (as of June 30): 10

— Total Value of Holdings (as of June 30): $1.08 billion

According to our records, 10 billionaires owned shares of Marathon Petroleum Corp (NYSE:MPC) at the end of June, up from six billionaires at the end of March. Although refining margins narrowed sharply in the first half, Marathon Petroleum Corp’s $1.44 per share annual dividend, which represents a 3.35% dividend yield at current prices, is safe. Not only are refiners cutting back on processing in the second half (and thus likely widening the refining margin again), but also Marathon’s payout ratio is just 35.2%. In previous quarters, Marathon’s management has used the other cash flow to buy back stock. The company is also confident in its future and on July 27, the company’s board of directors raised the quarterly dividend by 12.5% to $0.36 per share.

Although billionaire and Presidential candidate Donald Trump may not be as big of a fan of the department store as he used to, other billionaires certainly still like the stock. According to our records, the number of billionaires long Macy’s Inc (NYSE:M) rose by two quarter-over-quarter to 10 on June 30. Given that department stores are relatively insulated from competition from the likes of Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN), Macy’s dividend of $1.51 annually (4.18% yield at current prices, payout ratio of 58.6%) is safe. With a forward P/E of 10.42, the stock could also be considered a value play.